The pleasure, pain and growth of human connection.
It's summer and I'm getting married next month. My posts over the next few months may be lighter, shorter or even non-existent. There are a lot of new dynamics at play in our now household of seven. My time and energy are devoted to making these go smoothly. Since we have been meshing my fiance Mark's [...]
Things are getting serious here in the Minneapolis suburbs. Over Memorial Weekend Mark (fiancé), his two sons (ages 22 and 18) and their cat moved into the home I've been living in with my kids for 14 years. The actual move went relatively smoothly. Mark and I chipped away at the packing and unpacking. Now there [...]
The precursor to addiction is dislocation. — Bruce Alexander Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Simon Fraser University. In the quote above, dislocation is taken to mean the loss of psychological, social, and economic integration into family and culture — a sense of exclusion, isolation and powerlessness. In the much quoted book on addiction, "In the Realm [...]
On The One You Feed podcast, Eric Zimmer (host) and his guest, Skip Prichard, talked about success and how to find it. Skip said that success is when ambition and peace exist in the same measure at the same time. They talked about how Buddhism teaches that we suffer when we want more, therefore we should [...]
What is social anxiety? In my book, The Quiet Rise of Introverts, I define social anxiety as the fear of social or performance situations where embarrassment, judgment, criticism or rejection are perceived dangers. Somewhere along the line, as someone with social anxiety, we learned that we do not fare well under scrutiny. We fall short in [...]
According to Dr. Jonice Webb (Psychologist and author of one of my favorite personal growth books, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect), "A Core Feeling is the one emotion that you experienced the most often, or intensely, growing up. It becomes embedded in the software of your brain. As an adult, this feeling is [...]
